{"id":11572,"date":"2016-02-06T03:00:53","date_gmt":"2016-02-06T09:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hcstx.org\/?p=11572"},"modified":"2016-02-06T03:00:53","modified_gmt":"2016-02-06T09:00:53","slug":"war-movies-10-things-you-never-knew-about-full-metal-jacket","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/2016\/02\/06\/war-movies-10-things-you-never-knew-about-full-metal-jacket\/","title":{"rendered":"War Movies: 10 Things You Never Knew about Full Metal Jacket"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"ermey\"<\/h2>\n

Despite its widespread popularity, there is a ton of behind-the-scenes drama and literary awesomeness in Full Metal Jacket that gets missed.<\/h2>\n
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When it comes to pop-culture allure and romanticized brutality, Stanley Kubrick\u2019s \u201cFull Metal Jacket\u201d is arguably the most influential of all Vietnam War movies. R. Lee Ermey\u2019s iconic portrayal of the sadistic Gunnery Sgt. Hartman has served as a de facto recruiting mechanism for the Marines since the film\u2019s release in 1987. I remember watching the same VHS copy of \u201cFull Metal Jacket\u201d about a hundred times before I enlisted as a Marine combat correspondent, choosing the same military specialty as Private Joker. During the 10 years I served in the Corps, it was a rare occasion to find a Marine who didn\u2019t love the film.<\/p>\n

Despite FMJ\u2019s widespread popularity, there is a crap-ton of behind-the-scenes drama and literary awesomeness from the original novel that gets missed if you\u2019ve never looked into the film\u2019s backstory. Consider this list the enthralling special-features bonus\u00a0DVD you never saw.<\/p>\n

1. The book is better. <\/b>Okay, yes, this is an opinion, but hear me out. FMJ is based on the novel \u201cThe Short Timers\u201d by the late Gustav Hasford, aka, the real Joker. Hasford drew from his experience in Vietnam as a Marine correspondent with the 1st Marine Division to develop the novel. After the book\u2019s release in 1978, Newsweek\u2019s Walter Clemons called it \u201cthe best work of fiction about the Vietnam War.\u201d The film is brilliant, yes, but Kubrick \u2014 beholden to studio execs at Warner Bros. \u2014 had to cater to mainstream sensibilities, which is why the brutally macabre third and final section of the novel never made it to the screen.<\/p>\n

2. Civilian correspondent\u00a0<\/b>Michael Herr shared a screenwriter credit with Hasford and Kubrick.<\/b> \u201cDispatches\u201d is Herr\u2019s memoir about his time as a civilian correspondent for Esquire from 1967 to 1969. Herr\u2019s book is a masterpiece of literary nonfiction. While the vast majority of the dialogue in FMJ is taken straight from Hasford\u2019s book, the psycho door gunner\u2019s darkly comic dialogue<\/a> is pulled from \u201cDispatches,\u201d which you may or may not find disturbing in light of the fact that Herr\u2019s book is nonfiction.<\/p>\n

\"gunner\"<\/p>\n

3. There is a psycho-door-gunner scene in both \u201cDispatches\u201d<\/b>and \u201cThe Short Timers.\u201d <\/b>Noticing this, I briefly wondered if Hasford might have \u201cborrowed\u201d from Herr\u2019s book or if there were just a lot of psycho door gunners on Marine helicopters in Vietnam. I lean toward the latter possibility since the scenes\u2019\u00a0similarities\u00a0are negligible and the differences distinct. Hasford\u2019s gunner, for example, wears a Hawaiian sport shirt and smokes weed while eagerly wasting Vietnamese farmers in the hamlet below.<\/p>\n

4. Hasford wrote a sequel to \u201cThe Short Timers\u201d called \u201cThe Phantom Blooper.\u201d<\/b>In \u201cThe Phantom Blooper,\u201d Joker spends a year as a POW in a Vietcong village and eventually comes to sympathize with his Vietnamese captors. After he is rescued, he turns against the war and his government. Blooper was supposed to be book two of a trilogy, but Hasford died a few years after publishing it.<\/p>\n

\"born<\/p>\n

5. The peace symbol\/born to kill scene is derived from a short story Hasford wrote in community college after the war. <\/b>The short is called \u201cIs that you, John Wayne? Is this me?\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

Read the Remainder at Task and Purpose<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Despite its widespread popularity, there is a ton of behind-the-scenes drama and literary awesomeness in Full Metal Jacket that gets missed. When it comes to pop-culture allure and romanticized brutality, Stanley Kubrick\u2019s \u201cFull Metal Jacket\u201d is arguably the most influential of all Vietnam War movies. R. Lee Ermey\u2019s iconic portrayal of the sadistic Gunnery Sgt….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1286,2039,4029],"tags":[4396,4397,4398,1582,4399],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11572"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11572"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11572\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}